e grave; at all
events I have met with no mention of burying a corpse in a contracted
posture; and Captain Cook says that "when a person dies, he is buried,
after being wrapped up in mats and cloth, much after our manner." He
adds that, while chiefs had the special burial-places called _fiatookas_
appropriated to their use, common people were interred in no particular
spot.[203] So far as I have observed, none of our authorities speak of a
practice of embalming the dead or of giving the bodies any particular
direction in the grave.

[203] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 421.

After a death the mourners testified their sorrow by dressing in old
ragged mats and wearing green leaves of the _ifi_ tree round their
necks. Thus attired they would repair to the tomb, where, on entering
the enclosure, they would pull off the green twigs from their necks and
throw them away; then sitting down they would solemnly drink kava.[204]
Further, they accompanied their cries and ejaculations of grief and
despair by inflicting on their own bodies many grievous wounds and
injuries. They burned circles and scars on their bodies, beat their
teeth with stones, struck shark's teeth into their heads till the blood
flowed in streams, and thrust spears into the inner part of the thigh,
into their sides below the arm-pits, and through the cheeks into the
mouth.[205] Women in wailing would cut off their fingers, and slit their
noses, their ears, and their cheeks.[206] At the funerals of the kings
especially the mourners indulged in frantic excesses of self-torture and
mutilation. Of two such funerals we have the detailed descriptions of
eye-witnesses who resided in the islands at a time when the natives were
as yet practically unaffected by European influence. King Moom[=o]oe
died in April 1797, and the first missionaries to Tonga witnessed and
described his funeral. They have told how, when the corpse was being
carried in procession to a temporary house near the royal burial-ground
(_fiatooka_), it was preceded by relatives of the deceased in the usual
mourning garb, who cut their heads with shark's teeth till the blood
streamed down their faces. A few days later, when the burial was to take
place, the missionaries found about four thousand people assembled at
the mound where the body was to be interred. In a few minutes they heard
a great shouting and blowing of conch-shells, and soon after there
appeared about a hundred men, armed with clu